An Important Message

I’m the executive producer, live tweeter, editor, and one of the hosts of @idolthreat. If you’ve interacted with @idolthreat on Twitter, you’ve chatted with me.

This year has been an incredible experience for us on the show. We started out at the start of the season thinking we’d just do this little podcast, it’d be a bit of fun for our friends and some hardcore fans, and that’d be that.

Since then, things have blown up. We’ve been given the chance to chat to each contestant from the show. We’ve been retweeted thousands of times (I counted – more proof I have no life), including a few that got 100+ retweets. We became one of the highest trending topics on Trendsmap when we announced people could ask Christina Parie questions upon her elimination. We’ve recieved thousands of tweets, and got hundreds of hits on the idolthreat page on the SYN website.

We started out on Twitter, and in the past two weeks we’ve discovered something really interesting. During the 2010 season, we had no trouble keeping up with people’s tweets. However, we’ve noticed lately that some people’s @mentions haven’t shown up in our Mentions column.

As it turns out, once you start getting lots of tweets, some of them don’t show up. I don’t know why that is. I think it’s a Twitter server issue – you know when you get that “Loading Tweets seems to be taking a while” error message? It’s like that.

At the time of writing, it’s a Wednesday night. As I’m editing the podcast together, I’m reading our mentions back, trying to figure out if I chose the right questions to ask. I’m a bit hard on myself like that. I know it’s not going to change this episode we’ve just done, and that unless there’s some Back To The Future-style Delorean outside my house tomorrow, nothing’s going to change that. But it’s something I feel the need to do; to improve the show, to hear what everyone’s saying, to respond to people. I want people to feel like they’re being listened to. You guys are important.

But tonight, like last week, there’s a bunch of really good questions – including, if we’re naming names, tweets from @AudioVixenNCody, @MellMaltby, @jlkenward, @magskies, and @KortneeyW – which have shown up in between tweets from last night we used for the show. And we missed them last night – because we were getting so many tweets, they just didn’t show up.

That’s why we’ve had to change the way we do questions.

When someone gets eliminated, make sure you watch for our tweet when we mention which hashtag to tweet with – for example, this week we used #idolthreatdeclan to track your questions for Declan Sykes. That’s the way we’re going to do questions from now on – that way, we’ve got less chance of missing tweets.

If you tweet us during non-peak times (i.e. times that aren’t during/immediately after an X Factor show) we’ll probably see them. In fact, my phone is rigged so it beeps whenever you tweet @idolthreat, so really if you feel like saying hi, go for it – unless I’m at work I should be able to reply to you. However, if you’re tweeting us during The X Factor, please don’t get offended if we don’t reply – it’s just that your tweet might not have shown up.